The Great War is drawing to a close and the brutal slaving empire the Domination of the Draka is devouring the Ottoman Empire and planning to expand yet further. But Russian General Lavr Kornilov has something to say about that...

While the former Domination was being parceled out, the leaders of the Alliance for Democracy began discussing the postwar future. The sheer destruction the war had unleashed meant there would be few if any wars for at least a generation or two, but the leadership knew human nature. There was always the danger of fighting over the spoils of the fallen Domination and who knew what hatreds the end of Draka rule could unleash. There had already been Sunni-Shi'ite violence in the Middle East, as well as anti-Semitism and instances of non-Jews being driven off their land in the Levantine Federation.

So it was ultimately decided that the Alliance for Democracy would be renamed the Federation of Earth (or "Terran Federation" in more common parlance) and all nations would join. There was some objection to a worldwide government by people fearful of being governed by culturally-alien strangers or being tyrannized, but most people supported something like that as a means to keep war away forever.

Still, the skeptics had their good points, and so to allay their concerns about the potential dangers of a world government, every Earth nation and off-world polity would retain its armed forces and its domestic policies-provided, of course, they conformed to the human rights guaranteed by the Russian and American Constitutions-but there would be worldwide free trade and travel, a common currency, a common world military, and a bicameral Parliament of Nations. Each nation would get a seat in the Senate, while the House of Representatives would be determined by population.

Due to the fact most of the Alliance capitals were destroyed in the war, it was ultimately decided the new federal government would sit in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Republic, in a special district set aside for its used.

The first session of the Parliament of Nations took place in 2005. The major business conducted was the continued reconstruction of Alliance territories still damaged from the war and the former Domination, as well as the latter's integration into the new world order. Only the South African Federation remained anomalous due to the ban against drakensis leaving and the close Alliance supervision of its military and economy.

One particularly significant proposal came from the French delegation; rumor had it the idea came from none other than Therese LeFarge herself, the eminence grise of the French nuclear program and scientific establishment. It was proposed that to further unite humanity, there ought to be some kind of grand scientific endeavor. The French proposed the construction of a starship to settle the newly-discovered world of Samothrace, an Earth-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Building such a thing would unite all humanity in a common cause and provide a bolthole for the species in the event of a catastrophe destroying the human presence in the solar system-something that could have happened if the Final War went differently. The American scientist Carl Sagan and the hero of the space program and former U.S. President Robert Heinlein also supported the project, although the former wanted to wait until the pressing human needs generated by the Final War were dealt with first.

Despite the oceans of capital the space industries had generated, there was too much work to be done on Earth for the project to go ahead immediately. However, Speaker Antonin Mamedov ordered that a committee of the finest scientific minds in the human sphere be assembled to come up with plans for the effort, to be implemented later.

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